Food & Drink

Bodega Luigi Bosca | Familia Arizu, Mendoza, Argentina, announced that it has received a strategic investment from the Latin American fund of L Catterton, a global consumer-focused private equity firm. [...]

Commemorating a quarter century as a continuing partner of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, National Beverage Corp., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., implores others to join its mission to provide miracles for children stricken with life-threatening illnesses. [...]

Phoenix-based Shamrock Farms announced it has partnered with professional basketball player DeAndre Ayton, who was the No. 1 overall draft pick out of the University of Arizona, the company says. Ayton will represent the company's Rockin' brand of protein-milk beverages and be featured in Shamrock advertising, social media and public relation campaigns. [...]

Both Washington and Oregon vintners weathered a hot, dry summer in 2018, and even drifting smoke from wildfires in other regions. But timely rains and cooler temperatures in early fall led to lovely fruit and potentially great wines.Welcome to Wine Spectator's 2018 Wine Harvest Report, our coverage of Northern Hemisphere wine regions. (Our Southern Hemisphere 2018 harvest reports were published earlier this year.) While we won't know how good a vintage is until we taste the finished wines, these reports offer firsthand accounts from top winemakers in leading regions.Oregon sees smoke, but also promising winesWillamette Valley's winemakers are accustomed to curve balls in the weather, especially during harvest, but 2018 is the fifth year in a row that nature cooperated. "It was a beautiful year," said veteran winemaker Ken Wright of Ken Wright Cellars, a man who's typically blunt about a vintage's flaws. Josh Bergström of Bergström Wines agreed. "Oregon has never seen so much sunshine," he said. It was also one of the largest Oregon harvests on record. The growing season was uneventful in the early months. Budbreak and bloom progressed smoothly. May was dry by Oregon standards and there was little or no rain in summer, which was also unusually sunny. "It wasn't as hot [overall] as 2016 or 2017," Wright said. "But throughout the summer it was crazy dry and crazy hot."Those conditions touched off numerous wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, first in southern Oregon in July and then British Columbia and eastern Washington in August. As a result, a haze of smoke hovered over large parts of Willamette Valley for several days. Smoke taint doesn't appear to be an issue, winemakers said, although it can be difficult to identify early in the winemaking process. By mid-September the vines were weary from too much sun and not enough water, and began shutting down as ripening stalled. Growers and winemakers started to worry, but then a half an inch of rain arrived, reviving stressed vines. What followed was about two weeks of cool nights and warm but not blistering days. "That cooling kind of saved us," said Argyle winemaker Nate Klostermann. "If we hadn't had cooler weather, it might have been off the charts, ripeness-wise." As temperatures warmed again, harvest moved into a fast gear, with white and red grapes ripening quickly. "It was very compact at that point," Klostermann said.Most vintners were pleased with their Pinot. Bergström [...]

Bordeaux's Château Mouton-Rothschild makes a serious wine, but the newly unveiled label for the 2016 vintage shows it's not afraid to cut loose and get down. Following in the first-growth's famous annual tradition, the label features original artwork, and William Kentridge's creation, titled Triumphs of Bacchus, depicts a scene of full-on claret merriment, with a joyful procession of chalice-wielding, vine-crowned figures in silhouette. “I am especially happy with the choice of William Kentridge for the label of Mouton 2016 and with the work he has offered us for the vintage," Mouton co-owner Julien de Beaumarchais de Rothschild told Unfiltered of the Johannesburg-born painter, sculptor, video artist and stage director, "not only because he is the first artist in the collection from the African continent but also because his talent is that of both a great graphic artist and a man of the theater, which in that respect corresponds to a passion that runs through the family from my great-grandfather Baron Henri, a playwright, to my mother Baroness Philippine, a well-known actress." Kentridge drew his inspiration for the label from the paintings of great masters like Titian and Matisse. The artist has exhibited in venues ranging from the Venice Biennial to the MoMA in New York. Most recently, he conceived and directed the 2018 performance piece The Head and the Load, about Africans who served in Europe during World War I. Art, of course, has long been central to the narrative at Mouton, owned by siblings de Beaumarchais de Rothschild, Philippe Sereys de Rothschild and Camille Sereys de Rothschild. Since 1945, the estate has commissioned a design by a celebrated artist to illustrate the label of the latest vintage ready for shipment; artists are paid in wine. Deepix, Courtesy of Château Mouton-Rothschild The Versailles Celebration case art labels, from left: Lee Ufan, Jeff Koons, Anish Kapoor, Bernar Venet and Giuseppe Penone It's no surprise, then, that the Kentridge label isn't the only artistic endeavor for the estate this year: Mouton also recently announced an auction of 75 "Versailles Celebration" cases of five vintages each, to benefit restoration projects at the Palace of Versailles. For the boxed set, Mouton chose vintages with labels from five contemporary artists—Giuseppe Penone (2005), Bernar Venet (2007), Anish Kapoor (2009), Jeff Koons (2010) and [...]

You like to go out, but you're not one to party so hard you close down the bar. At work, you share ideas in meetings and also feel for those who stay quiet. You don't identify with your best friend who can chat with anyone for hours, but spending an entire weekend alone would make you feel cagey and bored.
Guess what? Sounds like you're a classic ambivert.
An ambi what? You've heard of the terms extrovert and introvert; each describes a specific personality type. Yet if you don't see yourself as outgoing enough to be extroverted or not shy and reticent enough to be introverted, you may be an ambivert, which means your personality falls between the two.
RELATED: 9 Ways to Spot a Sociopath
While it's easy to think that extroverts and introverts are two strictly different types, the reality is that we all lie somewhere on a scale, William Revelle, PhD, a psychology professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, tells Health. On one end, there's the very introverted. On the other, the very extroverted. An ambivert will fall somewhere in this middle space. “Ambivert simply means in between,” he says.
In fact, most of us occupy this personality middle ground. “We're talking about being average, and by definition, you expect people to be average,” Revelle explains. While being in the middle might sound like kind of a downer, average can actually be pretty great and offer big advantages in life.
Are you an ambivert?
An extrovert generally loves to go to parties every weekend—or at least have a packed calendar. An introvert tends to avoid social activities; being at home is their bliss. “Ambiverts don't avoid social situations, but they also don't seek them out very actively,” Barry Smith, professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Maryland, tells Health.
In the office, introverted team members avoid gossiping with coworkers. When they do chat it up, it's all about the job. An extrovert is hard to shut up sometimes; they may plant themselves at your desk to talk about everything. They go to happy hour or other work outings as often as possible and tend to be the first to arrive.
RELATED: 5 Signs Your Relationship Might Not Last, According to Experts
What about ambiverts at work? When called to an in-office party, an ambivert will stay at her desk and work if she's under deadline. If she's free, she'll head over briefly, [...]

You've heard of a foot fetish, but what about a sock fetish? One man's strange obsession with smelling his socks when he got home from work every day recently led to some major medical issues.
The 37-year-old man, from China, was recently hospitalized with a severe lung infection that doctors believe he contracted from taking whiffs of his dirty socks at the end of the day.
RELATED: This 36-Year-Old Literally Coughed Up His Lung Before He Died
Smelling your socks seems like a harmless habit—but not if a potentially dangerous fungus develops in your footwear, which is apparently what happened in this case. When the man inhaled his sock odor, he inhaled the fungus as well. It entered his lungs, causing an infection characterized by chest pain and coughing fits. The man went to the hospital, where he received his diagnosis.
Doctors noted the man's immune system was already weak because he didn't typically get enough sleep. His home life was stressful because he was also raising a child, so that didn't help his immune system either. (If you're a parent yourself, you know how that goes.)
The man was treated immediately when he went to the hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.
RELATED: 7 Kinds of Coughs and What They Might Mean
Because details of this case have come from social media platforms like YouTube and not a reputable medical journal, we decided to ask an expert if this is really possible. Can you actually contract an infection from smelling your dirty socks?
Aaron Glatt, MD, spokesperson for the Infectious Diseases Society of America and chair of medicine at South Nassau Communities Hospital in New York, thinks it is possible—but pretty unlikely.
People have fungus on their feet all the time, Dr. Glatt says, so that part of the story isn't surprising to him. And yes, certain fungal infections are contracted through inhalation, but not typically from smelling something as harmless as socks.
RELATED: This Woman Thought She Had Pneumonia—but It Turned Out to Be Stage 4 Lung Cancer
Of course, Dr. Glatt isn't suggesting you smell your socks regularly, just for kicks. But if every once and a while you give them a quick sniff to see if you can wear them again or they have to go into the wash, you should be completely fine.
Still, people with weakened immune systems do need to be more careful, he warns. While he doesn't think smelling [...]